Rapture of Canaan (17 page)

“He’s just growing up, child. And you are too. I know he’s spending more time with the men, but he hasn’t forgotten you. That’s how men are.”

“Can I stay here for a while?” I asked Nanna. “I don’t want to go home.” It was a Saturday, and I was supposed to be helping Mamma clean.

“Yes,” Nanna said. “I’ll run over to your house and tell Maree you’re helping me with my floors. Go ahead and get the broom.”

So I spent the afternoon with Nanna, while Mamma cleaned alone and the men fished. But I couldn’t talk. I cried and my nose poured so hard that I could have mopped the floor with snot, but Nanna didn’t make me work. She brought me a bowl of prunes instead, and each one doubled in my mouth.

 

 

 

I
did not sleep on a single nettle. I thought about it. But then
I decided that I wasn’t even comfortable when I was awake, so why should I be miserable when I was asleep? I was going to Hell anyway, no matter how many thorns I covered up with, so I didn’t even bother.

 

 

 

J
ames was happier than I’d ever known him. All he wanted to
do was kiss on me during prayer partners. He didn’t even try to be cautious about it because as far as he was concerned, we were husband and wife during that hour every evening.

Before, there’d been something graceful about his tentativeness. But all that was gone. Before, all he’d had to do was brush against the skin on the inside of my legs and it was like a glorious electrocution inside. But after we had the rings, the rings that weren’t even real, James seemed clumsy and forceful, and I hated it.

But from time to time, I’d forget how bad things were. Sometimes, when he put his mouth on just the right part of my ear, I’d think that maybe God
had
been speaking to me, that maybe I wasn’t making the rings up, that if James said God had given him a ring for me, then maybe it was at least partly true.

Then I started wondering if maybe how you made God answer was by giving him the first part of the sentence you wanted him to say.

I thought I was a liar, but I wasn’t certain.

One Sunday in church, sitting between Nanna and James like I always did, with Grandpa Herman right in the middle of his terrible story about how Nanna was a liar who had lied to God by not telling about her mamma’s affair with Weston Ward and an accomplice to murder because she didn’t stop her daddy from being killed, I decided to speak in tongues.

It wasn’t something I’d been planning. And it wasn’t something that God told me to do either. It just happened, all of a sudden, like a rooster that crows in the middle of the day for no apparent reason.

I stood right up and spoke out. I said something like, “Lord, please open my heart and fill me up with your beauty and love. Lord, I’m asking you for your precious gift.”

In front of me, Mamma and Daddy, David and Laura, Everett and Wanda, Bethany and Olin all opened up their mouths and started praying out loud, so loud that I felt like I needed to shout.

“Lord, I’m here. Take me and fill me up,” I said again.

“Praise
God,” Grandpa Herman called.

“Help her,
Sweet
Jesus,” Olin yelled.

All around me, I could feel a heat, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out or not.

“Lord, I want to know you inside and out,” I hollered. “I want to know your hebamashundi welaka oma hebamashundi.”

The only word I knew for sure that I’d heard people speak in tongues was hebamashundi, so I let that one move my lips again and again.

Then I knew I was going to pass out. I was almost certain. I felt sick and weak and carried away. As far as I could tell, God wasn’t leading me anywhere. I was making the words up as I went, and they seized up in my mouth and spilled like lies all over the hard wood floor.

“Help me, Jesus,” I tried. “Help me not get caught in your welamaka oma hebamashundi,” and then I began to whisper or maybe to cry.

Around the church, there was the sound of whoops and Amens and clapping and the strange words that I was making up, making up, and everything was dark on either side of me, but right up front, where Grandpa Herman stood, beckoning me with his arms, it was bright for a second, and then that was gone too and I was sitting back down, out of breath, convulsing inside.

I couldn’t look at Nanna or James. I couldn’t sing aloud with the congregation though I moved my heavy tongue through the song.

It was the longest day in church I’ve ever known. I couldn’t break the trance I’d induced myself. I walked around for days whispering under my breath “hebamashundi, hebamashundi.”

 

 

 

M
y
mind was slow those days. I worked in the fields and sang
with everybody else, but later I couldn’t remember it. I went to supper and picked at my food, but by the time I went to bed, I couldn’t recall what we’d had. I went to prayer partners with James and obliged him as much as I could, and I guess I even talked to him, though I can’t imagine what I said.

Ben Harback, who had recovered from his sickness, finally broke in two. He just came in mad to breakfast one morning and told Grandpa that he was sick and tired of his bullshit, and that he intended to leave and tell the whole world about what Fire and Brimstone had done to him. Grandpa Herman ceremoniously kicked him out, and as Ben was leaving, he yelled things that made the women cover their ears. But I didn’t cover mine. It didn’t even shock me.

And then we had a week of preachings every night after prayer partners, all titled “Vitamins Against Evil” to help the rest of the congregation not fall into Satan’s hands like Ben had done. I sat beside Nanna each night, but I didn’t talk to her, and when she put her hands on my legs to pat them during the sermons, I hardly felt it. We didn’t get into our beds until long past midnight and had to be in the fields when the sun came up, which meant we ate breakfast in the dark.

I knew that I was probably having a baby, and that probably it was James’ baby and not Jesus’. But I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it, to even think about it. So I didn’t.

“Hebamashundi,” I whispered to each leaf of tobacco as I popped it off the stalk. “Hebamashundi,” I mouthed to the hornworms I shook off before I tossed the tobacco onto the drags.

My eyes locked into a blurry, unblinking place. When we’d finished a field, I’d stand at the edge, looking over the stripped stalks with only their tops left and thinking that we’d made ruffles by popping the leaves away. We’d taken the tobacco’s clothes and left it with only ruffles to hide beneath.

The whole time James would pray, I’d say it over and over to God. “Hebamashundi, hebamashundi,” like it was a password into a secret gate that I really needed to get through.

At nights, I didn’t talk to Jesus. I imagined him. I closed my eyes and saw him on the cross, holding azaleas for me, dying for me, bleeding for me,
instead
of me, and I was jealous of Jesus, who could die when things got tough. It seemed like he got a lucky break.

 

 

 

D
o you think that samebody like Ben Harback, who has
sinned so terribly and so many times, can still enter the kingdom of Heaven?” I asked Mamma one day as we were putting clothes on the line. I was beginning to worry about my soul and my belly. I’d finally admitted that you can only stay in a trance for so long before you have to wake up and rejoin the world, before you forget how.

“If he does enough penance,” Mamma said. “And if he asks Jesus to come back into his heart.”

“You mean Jesus will
leave
your heart sometimes?” I said, and handed her a pair of Daddy’s pants. The wet clothes were draped over my arms, weighing me down so much I kept moving to keep from being planted there.

“Oh yes,” Mamma said. “Your body is a temple for the Lord. And if it gets to looking like a pigsty in there, the Lord will just find him another home.”

“But I thought God was always with you,” I said.

“It’s a cooperative effort,” Mamma explained. “God will always be with you, but first you have to get the conditions right. You have to invite him in and mean it. What are you worrying about this for?”

“Cause I don’t want Ben to go to Hell just because he sinned,” I claimed.

“Well, you worry about your soul and let Ben worry about his, okay?” And then without waiting for me to answer, she started singing “The Old Rugged Cross.”

I didn’t join in though. I didn’t even remember that I was supposed to until she turned back and said, “Is something the matter, Baby?”

“No, ma’am,” I promised, and began the second verse.

 

 

 

T
hen I got to thinking that maybe it was Jesus’ baby
—because if we really hadn’t been sinning and had only been knowing Jesus through each other, then it couldn’t be anything
but
Jesus’.

I counted back and discovered that the baby almost had to be planted inside of me before James and I had exchanged the invisible rings, the rings that only James and Jesus could see.

If God had given a virgin a baby before, he could do it again. I thought I must be a virgin. I had to be. Because in order to not be a virgin, you either had to be married or had to be wicked, and I was halfway convinced that I wasn’t either of those even though I had a few doubts.

I couldn’t imagine why God would want to curse a person like me—because I worked hard and obeyed my parents and prayed and didn’t sass at grown-ups hardly at all. So I decided that maybe it wasn’t a curse.

And then I comforted myself with the knowledge that unless a baby’s
supposed
to stay planted in your womb, it falls out. It had happened to Laura over and over, and Grandpa said the baby had left her because of sins. So if I was really so wicked and evil, the baby would have left me too.

And I knew that I came to Mamma and Daddy when they weren’t even meaning to beget me, and they’d always said that I was the special child, the one God intended for them to have even though they didn’t plan it. So if I was carrying a child of my own, that had to mean that it was God’s special plan, and God had surprised people before, and they’d survived.

I decided I’d better tell James about it. I thought that if I made it sound like we were getting a special gift, maybe he wouldn’t be upset.

“What?” he nearly shouted. We were in the living room again, with Mamma and Daddy just down the hall in the bedroom.

“Shhh,” I begged. “I think I’m having Jesus’ baby.”

“What do you mean you’re having Jesus’ baby?”

I tried to act excited, but my voice jerked a little. “I’m, you know, with child.”

“Ninah, you can’t be.”

“I am,” I said.

“Oh shit.”

“James, don’t say that.”

“Oh hell, fire, and damnation,” he cursed. “Ninah, they’re gonna kill us.”

“Even if it’s Jesus’ baby?” I started to cry. I wanted him to put his arm around me, but he didn’t.

“It’s my baby, Ninah. Not Jesus’.”

“But if I was knowing Jesus through you, then you were just the vehicle,” I tried.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ninah.”

I don’t know what surprised me more, hearing James’ reaction or realizing that all that time, he didn’t think Jesus was acting through him at all.

“You mean you don’t think it was Jesus—when we touched?”

“No,” he said. “It was me and you, sinning like crazy.”

“But even at first?”

“It was me and you,” he said again, shaking his head. “The Devil comes to man in the shape of a woman. I knew that. But I didn’t think it’d be
you.
” And he walked out.

 

 

 

I
sat on the doorsteps next to Mamma, pulling the silks from
corn. At the bottom of the steps, Daddy leaned over a bushel basket, shucking one ear after the other, yanking off the green husks and passing the naked corn to us to clean.

Mamma could pull off a silk without even breaking it, but I always pulled too hard, from the wrong angle, and ended up having to dig out the silks with my fingernail.

As I worked, I thought about what James had said, and I fumed. I wasn’t the Devil. The Devil wasn’t inside me. I was almost sure.

Daddy tossed husks to the ground and with them, the crown of silks curled up and darkened like little-girl hair turned brown.

I always thought of corn as female before it was shucked. Undressed, it turned hard and regular, the kernels lined up like soldiers. Underneath, it didn’t look the way I always thought it should.

I didn’t think I was the Devil, but I wondered if beneath my skin, I was so different I wouldn’t even recognize myself.

I hated James that night. Nobody had ever said anything so cruel to me before.

And if what we’d done was a sin, then it’d come from inside us both. Not just me. And not because I was the woman.

I studied Daddy’s hands as he passed ears to me. The silks hung from his fingers like temptations that wouldn’t fall away no matter how hard he shook them.

I looked at Mamma’s hands as she coaxed the shiny threads from between kernels, determined to remove every last clinging menace.

I left silks on my ears on purpose—little secret ones that wouldn’t be noticed right away. And I must have been the Devil, at least a tiny bit, because I was on fire from the inside, hot and smoldering and thinking terrible things about James.

I handled the corn so hard I punctured kernels with my fingers. I thought being the Devil wouldn’t be so bad if I could just burn James up.